I'm sure the 'esteemed professor and his mates' are aware of that, having actually done their research.
This is how contextual offers work at the moment, Bristol for example. State schools are weighted according to postcode and their overall grades. They accept that an A* in a low performing school is much harder to achieve than in a private, grammar or top state school.
They also take into consideration adverse childhood experiences, time in care, illness etc.
This seems fair.
The flaw in this debate is that many private school parents don't care about educational equality. Why would they when they're at the top of the pile?
I include myself and my own child in this.
I have friends with children at boarding school who are furious their child didn't get an offer from Oxford because 'they want more state school kids'
I'd be furious too if I'd spent £200k+ to give my child a disadvantage. Except of course she's not disadvantaged at all and will certainly never struggle for money or connections.
The last government didn't care about it either.
But most people believe that society as a whole is better if everyone is given a decent chance, and everyone has a chance to succeed despite their environment as well as because of it.
The government doesn't really have to persuade the people at the top to be able to do that.
"“To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.” and all that.
As for people leaving the country, maybe everyone has had enough of that too. The last government has driven the country off a cliff in desperate pursuit of the super wealthy. Brexit being an absolute act of vandalism. Bankers caused a world financial crisis which austerity paid for. Maybe voters have decided that the price of keeping these fragile high earners is too high.
JK Rowling's view on this is sound, although I doubt many people feel the same.
"I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.
A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug."